


Obscura

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Crossing Lines
Genre: Angst, Birthday, Champagne, Episode Tag, Gen, Introspection, POV Third Person, Team Dynamics, Team Feels, Team as Family, The Odyssey References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 16:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16122677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian





	Obscura

He worries about them. If they notice, he presumes they accept it as a matter of course: _it’s what the old man does._ It is what old men do: fret about the future, try to shape it, try not to meddle too much with it, try to trust that it will emerge startling and better than imagined. Michel Dorn has seen far too much wickedness to have hope in the future as such. But, although evil remains depressingly predictable, goodness — goodness still has the power to surprise him.

He worries about them, his team. In the wreckage of two years ago, he had scarcely dared to imagine a new beginning. The deaths had seemed like a terrible portent, a sudden smiting by the gods no one believed in anymore. He can still see Eva, killed in an anonymous hotel room; dead in her blood because of who she was, the brave daughter of the wrong father. And Louis… he still aches for Louis, who had walked unflinching and unhesitating to arrest a criminal who was also a suffering human being, who had died in his friend’s arms because of it. Carl at least had found a future for himself; Dorn sometimes gets irreverent postcards from New York. He occasionally hears from Dublin — not from Tommy — that his erstwhile protégé’s work behind a desk is of an excellence that annoys his superiors almost as much as it seems to annoy Tommy himself. Well. After the bullet, after Eva, there had been no other way. Sometimes he wonders what he was thinking, reforming the team. 

He worries about Arabela: smart, resilient Arabela, who has had to bear far too much, and who always will. She has come to trust herself more fully; that, at least, is a victory. She is brilliant, of course. She knows when to trust her instincts, and knows that instinct is not enough. She respects the protocols, and she’s unafraid to take risks. Yes, he is proud of Arabela. But he knows he could lose her in any number of ways: to a bullet or a bomb or the random, rancid hatred of a racist unfit to lick her shoe. She’d been terribly composed after their last case, and he had known it was not his place to probe that composure.

He’s not sure what Arabela sees in Wilkinson, but he doesn’t need to be. All that matters, Dorn tells himself firmly, is that they trust each other, and work well together. And Wilkinson is, perhaps by dint of sheer stubbornness, a very good officer. Dorn thinks he might become a good man. In his more optimistic moments, when he watches the bull-headed Englishman handing Arabela a coffee or listening to Erich’s school stories, he thinks that Wilkinson already is, when he allows himself to be. Dorn only hopes he doesn’t get himself killed before he figures out who he wants to be.

Of all of them, he worries about Ellie the least. Dorn recognizes this as paradoxical. She is young enough to be his granddaughter; occasionally, he will be visited by a kind of vertigo, seeing her across the room and realizing this. But if she has the insecurities of her upbringing, she has its confidence too. Ellie is a woman who strides boldly towards the future she wants for herself. She may quail before it, sometimes. She may doubt herself, sometimes — often, despite the small kindnesses with which the others tenderly surround her. But Ellie is not the kind of woman to turn back before danger or difficulty. And for this Dorn is grateful. He hopes to live long enough to see the beginnings of her rise, and perhaps even the fading of her fear. 

He worries about Sebastian, Sebastian who is patient and resourceful, and who makes jokes less and less often. There is a weariness behind his eyes that never seems, quite, to go away. Perhaps, Dorn tells himself, this is inevitable. Perhaps all he is seeing is the waning of Sebastian’s youth, and perhaps it must always be so. But somehow, this seems like a tragedy. He is — as he has always been — very, very good at his job. He is a genius in a field that will never give him an award. And he has become less impulsive, and less self-absorbed; he is kind by habit, as well as by instinct. Sebastian, who has seen so many of his friends die, has stayed in a job where he must work late hours and confront evil instead of placidly, unexceptionally earning a generous paycheck in a German suburb. Dorn knows that Sebastian would never forgive him if he suggested that Sebastian consider alternatives, ill though the team could spare him. But he still worries.

He worries about Constante. More, he is afraid for him. Fearlessness might seem, on the face of it, a desirable quality in an officer. But Dorn, who has spent decades of his life evaluating evidence and people, finds himself wishing that the younger man placed a higher value on his own skin. Dorn had asked the impossible question about his sister knowing that it was a risk. And Constante had given him a cliché about hope. Perhaps it’s all he deserves. Dorn is uneasily conscious of having done all he can think of to reach past Constante’s formidable defenses, without much discernible result. It is the same feeling as being in the courtroom and sensing the atmosphere shift: the rustle of silk from the opposite bench, the relaxing of tension in the spine of the accused, the knowledge of having to failed to ask the one question, or bring the one piece of evidence, that would bring at least some justice in the aftermath of unbearable cruelty. And now Constante stands alert, tense, just close enough to the table to seem still part of the group, just far enough away that the flames from the candles cast his face into shadow. And Dorn worries.

He worries about Carine: immaculate Carine, who is so passionate, and so quiet. He worries about Carine, and the risks she takes. Raising her voice to him to argue for her own qualifications — that had been a risk, and he had loved her for it. And then there had been the less pardonable risk: pulling Constante in, deciding to use him like a tool, and his loss like a weapon. She is always alert to the risks taken by her own team; it makes her a good captain. But he wonders, sometimes, if she sees the risks she takes herself. He wonders if he is right to think that she takes the work almost too calmly, or if he is judging her by a standard that ought not to apply. But she is so perfectly collected, so unwaveringly poised. He has never seen one of her silk blouses stained. She had been genuinely surprised, that they should think of her life as something worth celebrating in itself. And she had refused to speak ( _I don’t; I can’t_ ), Carine who is never at a loss for the right words.

Sometimes he thinks that the Greeks invented the word hubris for men like him. Sometimes he sees himself in Odysseus, the man who fought enemies more powerful than himself for years; the man who defeated them; the man who saw all his followers killed, destroyed, devoured.

Michel Dorn raises his champagne glass, and makes a toast.


End file.
